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I was a true believer on this and followed Maddow faithfully for most of the time during Obama's presidency and then through Trump's. She is incredibly persuasive in how she mines stories and digs up facts, so much so that it was very easy to fall into this trap. I read every book on Putin. I read Maddow's book. I believed all of the lines were clearly drawn to prove that he was a groomed Russian stooge. Watch the many movies on streaming about it. It is still absolutely true in the minds of most on the left. That was only the beginning of the hysteria, though. Now that Trump is gone it does not show signs of calming down. In fact, Maddow and everyone at MSNBC and CNN and in the mainstream press continue to behave as though they are STILL oppressed by the fear of Trump. January 6 was their Reichstag Fire to attain absolute power through fear - power across the board. What's most shocking is how the media is just willingly going along with it even now. That Washington Post story is a scandal and yet do a google search and the only stories that come up are on Fox and Newsweek. It should be at such a level of scandal people lose their jobs. But do you think they will? No. Moreover, when you have a media that essentially installed a president they are now invested in defending that president, their administration and all that goes along with it. Thus, they can't begin to untangle the fusion of government and media.

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CBS News is reporting that MSNBC has reported that NBC News has confirmed that the New York Times has identified an anonymous source who overheard someone close to the former administration claim that a person in Trump's inner circle stated on a private phone call that Trump is...controlled by Satan!

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Glenn, I say without sarcasm or hyperbole that you are likely the most important journalist in the U.S. right now. There are no other voices with a public platform who have the combination of your credibility, reach and courage. Please do not stop shaming those in the media, govt. and corporate America who have abandoned any commitment to honor, truth and dignity in the era of Trump Derangement Syndrome. This is McCarthyism on steroids and we must have the courage to put it down. Please stay the course in the face of the certain coordinated attacks you will face from those you are holding accountable.

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The purpose of modern corporate journalism is not to report facts but to shape public opinion and promote an elitist narrative. Judged by these criteria they are not comitting malpractice but rather fulfilling their mission.

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I always think of the poor koi. The internet alight with images of a calloused Trump overfeeding the Holy fish in a pristine Japanese garden by dumping the remaining bits of food from his container. CNN and other outlets were naturally outraged and ran the video over and over. They did, however, cut the images. Had they allowed another 5 seconds, the world could have seen Prime Minister Abe do the exact same thing. The outlets chose not to show the last bit. This seems a silly example, but there was a deliberate decision to make this innocent moment among world leaders into a scandal.

Glenn has nailed it here. One other disturbing question is: how often does this happen and we never find out? The cost in that is enormous.

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One of my favorite practices of Tucker Carlson Tonight is when they put together montages of mountebanks and their media toadies quite seriously and sanctimoniously repeating the same term throughout the leftist echo chamber euphemistically referred to as the "press".

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=urAF4Tx_m3g

Why, it is almost as if there is some central agency somewhere, perhaps buried deep in some racist resistant bunker buried deep in a DNC basement, perhaps known (only internally, on a need-to-know basis, of course) as the Coprolite Coordination Commissariat, stuffed with busy apparatchiks brainstorming "ideas" and in tight communication with the luminous leftist leadership to insure that their legions of lemmings remain enthralled with the hive mind.

Truly, it is a triumph of progressive government "education" that untold millions actually buy this never-ending stream of blatant bullshit.

I often ponder what separates those of us in the reality-based community from these great herds of credulous true believers, which in my case include many friends and family members who are generally articulate and intelligent.

It is almost as if a portion of their cognitive abilities simply turn off, as if connected to some ideological switch they are powerless to see or flip.

Quite the impenetrable mystery, this.

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Hold my beer-

Dopey Papadopoulos got jail time for misstating a date and time of a meeting that meant absolutely nothing........meanwhile FBI Attorney Clinesmith admits he willfully altered and deleted relevant data for a FISA warrant that went forward and was approved......and? He pleas out with no jail time.

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Remember the story of the boy who cried wolf? The Propaganda arm of the US Oligarchy should refresh their memory.

Still, to me personally, the most disturbing part of it all, is that with Hunter, and the money- complete media silence. How they honestly have the gall, after all the Russiagate, to not even once address the evidence against 'the big guy' & Hunter, astonished me. This fact alone, more than any other, proved in my mind, that what we call news media in this country, is predominantly and exclusively Propaganda for the DNC. Utterly devoid of facts. Narrative shaping of the most crooked order.

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Well done article. Very scary. The CIA’s fingerprints, IMO, are all over these “news” companies and their toady “journalists”. From Allen Dulles to Gina Haspel (not to mention John Brennan) this insidious spider web has been cast. From Truman to Eisenhower to poor JFK, they have usurped the constitutional role of the President, so that from Johnson to this day all Presidents fear them (ask Chuck Schumer). To quote President Harry Truman after JFK’s assassination:

“I never would have agreed to the formulation of the Central Intelligence Agency back in forty-seven, if I had known it would become the American Gestapo.”

Like I said...scary. Add in the FBI, the NSA, etc., even scarier. You are pulling the tigers tail and the lions whiskers, and poking the bear, Glenn. This is a dangerous beast.

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Holy shit! Glenn is on FIRE! Don’t let up Glenn. Keep on hammering these liars!

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The Intercept appears to have removed your 2019 “The 10 Worst, Most Embarrassing U.S. Media Failures on the Trump-Russia Story” article.

Not surprised. we have always been at war with Eurasia.

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Sigh. None of these revelations seem to matter. Half the population still seems to believe the Corporate Media fiction of Trump=Russian Stooge and Trump Voters=Violent Insurrectionists so thorough was their brainwashing. The stories were everywhere, except cereal boxes and milk cartons, all day, for years. I know more Biden voters than Trump voters by a large margin. They all hated and hate Trump with a red hot passion; but couldn't actually explain why. They never had to explain why to their friends because they all agreed with each other. The media and academia gave them permission to simply shut down challenges to their group think. So they didn't have to arm themselves with facts. These were all folks who went to college when they still taught critical thinking skills. This is the most pernicious aspect of the whole anti-Trump frenzy. Go figure.

Funny though that the MAGA hat wearing Trump fans got physically attacked; but it was the Biden voters who were deathly afraid of the other. The media did it's job well. I'm amazed that Trump had the support he had at the end so relentless was the corporate media campaign against him.

I'm flabbergasted that troops and fences are treated a normal when one party does it. I'm amazed that universities have become re-education camps. I'm amazed that so few journalists and readers have the courage to question this alternate reality. Who would have thought that so many credentialed, milquetoast, J-school grads could be so dangerous. Alaric would be jealous. So much destruction accomplished by so few in so short a time. Truly amazing.

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Humans are not good at thinking exponentially. Fold a piece of paper 50 times on itself and it reaches the sun. The exponential effect of each fold -- doubling the width of the folded paper -- is difficult to grasp without a calculator.

Likewise, humans are not good at applying the Gell-Mann Amnesia to themselves. The classic Gell-Mann example was given by Michael Crichton: He's reading a NYT story about show business -- a subject with which he is well acquainted -- and he knows it's factual rubbish. Then he turns the page and reads a story about Palestine, which he accepts as unquestionably true because it's not something with which he has any expertise. https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/65213-briefly-stated-the-gell-mann-amnesia-effect-is-as-follows-you With Gell-Mann Amnesia, you forgive those times when you know your source is false.

The mainstream media knows this. They long ago stopped caring about their reputations as truth tellers or accurate sources of information. The only thing that matters now is their reputation for telling their audience what they want to hear. Actually, it's even a tad more sinister than that. They first convince their audience what to believe on a particular issue, then they constantly reinforce that by telling the audience that the issue is important and what to believe about it. Truth be damned as long as it's what the audience has been conditioned to believe. Orwellian? You bet.

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Plenty of other examples of this crap, especially with the Medical Industrial Complex. Their #1 for me was the assassination of hydroxychloroquine by the most powerful voices in that universe:

1. Fauci says hydroxychloroquine bad based on Lancet paper:

https://www.cnn.com/2020/05/27/politics/anthony-fauci-hydroxychloroquine-trump-cnntv/index.html

2. Lancet paper which stopped ongoing research on hydroxychloroquine has some problems, like for example completely fabricated data:

https://www.patientcareonline.com/view/lancet-nejm-retract-covid-19-studies-after-surgisphere-fallout

3. Who is Surgisphere, the exclusive data source for the Lancet paper? How could they report more deaths from hydroxy-taking Covid patients in Australia, than actual Covid deaths in that country? How could The Lancet, guardians of the peer-reviewed gold standard, publish a paper on the most important public medical issue in decades that is solely based on data from these jokers?

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/jun/03/covid-19-surgisphere-who-world-health-organization-hydroxychloroquine

4. Reasonable summary:

https://www.hoover.org/research/lancets-covid-fiasco

Any apologies from our science-based leaders and organizations? Any actions to give the HCQ ultra-cheap treatment approach a fair analysis? To be fair I don't hold the mass media as much to account on this hatchet job, simply because their basic ignorance on any scientific issue has been well established.

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Glenn, “The 10 Worst, Most Embarrassing U.S. Media Failures on the Trump-Russia Story" has apparently been scrubbed from the internet.

Any chance you could post it on Substack?

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". . . the sectors of the media pretending to be most distraught at the spread of “disinformation” by anonymous citizens on Facebook and 4Chan are, in fact, the most aggressive, prolific and destructive disseminators of that disinformation by far . . ."

This statement is the crux of the entire matter, the true reason the "old media" and the CIA (but I repeat myself) are so desperate to shut down and "disappear" real news sources like Substack and real journalists like Greenwald and Taibbi. Both of these men were part of the elite few journalists raising red flags concerning the witch hunt against the Trump administration. I say "elite" in the sense that it takes massive bravery to go against the State-approved narrative in the U.S. today.

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